The View From Maybelot

[AndyinPA]

Looking good.

[northland10]

The new beams and columns are in! This space gets filled with gravel today, and the slab gets poured next week!

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Looks like a house or two I saw on Zillow this week.

[Maybenaut]

They poured the concrete floor yesterday. Next week is framing of the interior walls and running electrical. Then sheetrock, paint and flooring. We’ll also install kitchen cabinets on one wall of the family room. We’re taking a slow bell, and hoping to be done by end of August.

Because of a low beam at the front we had to custom-order a garage door. That has a 4-6 week lead time, so that won’t be in for awhile yet.

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[Volkonski]

[bill_g]

Are they curing it under plastic sheeting?

[Maybenaut]

No. I don’t know from concrete. Dude said we don’t need to do any of that. He said we can walk on it now, but not to park or build the walls for five days.

[bill_g]

Okay. I can see the ripples of the plastic in the surface. No big deal. It's an aesthetic issue remedied by flooring.

On the plus side you'll never have critters in the crawl space, or concerns about furniture being too heavy for the floor joists (ala water beds crashing through the ceiling below). I have some stories about those kinds of issues.

[Maybenaut]

They never put any plastic down. What you see are swirly marks from a machine they used to smooth the surface. Plus dust. There’s a lot of dusty footprints.

But, as you say, it’ll all be covered with flooring, except the far end, which will be the garage.

[bill_g]

Oh! Did they use the waterbug that floated on top of the pour on those slow turning fan things? Did a guy sit in it and drive it around, or was it the smaller remote control kind?

[Maybenaut]

It was a walk-behind kind - looked like an over-sized floor polisher but with fan blades instead of a pad.

[Maybenaut]

Who needs fireworks? Happy Fourth of July!

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[keith]

...or concerns about furniture being too heavy for the floor joists (ala water beds crashing through the ceiling below). I have some stories about those kinds of issues.

I never heard of waterbeds crashing through floors, and I used water beds for years.

Counterintuitively, a waterbed puts much less weight per square inch than a refrigerator.

The fridge weighs on two joists concentrated in four one or two inch pads. The waterbed is supported by five or six joists and the weight is supported by pads measured in square feet.

[bill_g]

...or concerns about furniture being too heavy for the floor joists (ala water beds crashing through the ceiling below). I have some stories about those kinds of issues.

I never heard of waterbeds crashing through floors, and I used water beds for years.

It was an "illustrative example" - something people could grasp and imagine easier than plant batteries that look like aquariums filled with lead and H2SO4 (sulfuric acid). The refridgerator PSI floor problem was one I faced often. Good times.

[Maybenaut]

The refrigerator PSI problem is one of the reasons we did this pour. The crawl space was very shallow, The joists and the underlayment were rotten because the crawlspace was never encapsulated. The floors were really punky, to the point we couldn’t put our two overflow refrigerators where we really wanted them.

To do it right we would have had to rip everything out, encapsulate the crawlspace with a heavy vinyl, replace all the rim joists and the floor joists, and install new underlayment. That would have taken much longer and cost about the same (or maybe a little bit more). And I wanted a garage on the far end of the house. So we figured we’d solve all of our problems at once.

[bill_g]

Sounds like a smart solution. I am not fond of crawl spaces that narrow to face in the gravel spaces.

[bill_g]

One of my favorite wooden floor bearing too much weight stories involves a public safety agency that awarded a big comm system expansion bid to an out-of-state contractor. About a dozen new sites were to be constructed. Lots of concrete, towers, set-in buildings, comm and network equipment, antennas, wires, wires, wires, generators, and batteries. The bid spec called for enough battery to carry the site for 48hrs. That's a monster size pile of steel and lead and copper.

The contractor initially read the spec to mean two 24hr piles - an A string and a B string. That spec was clarified as a single 48hr string. So, they bid two 48hr piles - A string and B string. And the client didn't correct them. They approved it. They also approved the set-in buildings to be built in Louisiana and trucked to Oregon. These were ordinary wooden lumber constructions with stucco exterior siding, plywood interior walls, and plywood over wooden joists. No problem. The buildings will be set on poured concrete slabs.

And here is where the contractor interpreted the bid spec to be poured concrete foundations. IE: a short narrow poured concrete wall that mated to the exterior walls of the buildings, with dirt covered in vapor barrier and crushed agg in the crawl space. That's how they drew it in the site plans. That's what was approved. That's what was constructed, inspected, and all boxes checked.

Then they sent in their site power subcontractor who would provide the gensets, rectifiers, batteries, and all the wiring. They got as far as getting the double battery pile installed before the wooden floor joists dropped away heaving the batteries out the side wall collapsing the roof. Thankfully their crew was able to escape. It happened slowly enough they realized the mistake and got out of there.

The Louisiana crew were gone, and not coming back. We were hired to do like you did - clear the interior floor out and pour lots of concrete in the remaining structures. That first building didn't get rebuilt until very near the end of the project. I'll save the exciting story from this project (that we initially lost the bid for) about compasses and declination for another day.

[Maybenaut]

This is an unusual sunset for us. The sun is behind me, lighting up the clouds.

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[John Thomas8]

That's gotta be breathtaking in person.

[Maybenaut]

It really is. The iPhone doesn’t do it justice.

[bill_g]

It's beautiful. We get those when there is smoke in the air. Any big fires around?

[Maybenaut]

It's beautiful. We get those when there is smoke in the air. Any big fires around?

No. but there are storms to the east of us and clear skies overhead and to the west.

[AndyinPA]

Gorgeous sunset!

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Wow!